meal planning 4.0

As happens when chaos turns back towards routine at our house, I find the time to exercise more and meal plan.

We’re tried prescribed meal plans, a true CSA, having camille, plan, shop and cook, a themed meal plan, a customizable farm box, a boxed meal service, and another meal planning service.

Sigh. While some of these things worked for a while, then we hit another patch of chaos and everything goes out the window. None were great enough that I really wanted to start there again.

So for the past three months, I’m trying something a little different. For the past couple of years, I’ve kept a spreadsheet of the dinners we’ve had, including the recipe I used. Though I haven’t been consistent with it, there’s enough there for me to line up a selection of meals each week without having to think. A nice benefit of this is that with my celebrations, the meals to go along with them magically appear on (almost) the correct days.

Lately, I’ve been trying to keep the pantry empty of all but the staples. If I buy something for a recipe and have some left, I work it into a recipe in the next week or two in order to prevent too many open items.

In addition, I’ve been trying to keep an extra of everything that we do use regularly. As I have more room in the pantry by managing the open things, I have room to store the extra staples.

And so now that I’ve got the planning a bit more organized once again, it is time to consider the groceries that we buy. The customizable farm box generally worked well, but we still ended up with produce that we didn’t know what to do with or that was complicated to use. We also had a short window in which to pick up the box. Now that both pickup locations on our block have closed, I think we may switch to another service that has come highly recommended: Fresh Harvest.

Fingers crossed.

tortellini soup – 19 jan 2017